If you were building a business intelligence tool from scratch today, in 2007, you would probably develop it as an enterprise search tool with user access capabilities that accommodate English-like approaches to query. And, indeed, that seems to be the horizon of a different set of tools such as those by Fast, Coppereye and Endeca, all of which appear to tolerate the DBMS, but also are poised to access information in disparate places. You may or may not consider these as BI vendors, but I suggest they are.
Bigger BI players will be adopting enterprise search as a means to extend their footprint in shops and spur new activity in existing clients. I think it will pull more people into active usage of information, but it will largely end up as cannibalization for the bigger vendors - a necessary and costly shift to keep the customer base.
“BI for the masses” as a concept will not mean interactive OLAP capabilities for broad audiences in any organization. Rather, it means the benefits of BI and interactive access will extend to the functions performed by all in an organization. It also means a wider deployment of information consumption.
Do you agree? Will we see a shift in how information is accessed?
Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Enterprise Search
Posted August 17, 2007 2:40 PM
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